31 December 2014

For New Year's Eve, instead of embedding fireworks I've chosen a classic song. "We'll Meet Again" was a signature tune of World War II:

The song... resonated with soldiers going off to fight and their families and sweethearts. The assertion that "we'll meet again" is optimistic, as many soldiers did not survive to see their loved ones again. Indeed, the meeting place at some unspecified time in the future would have been seen by many who lost loved ones to be heaven.

There have been many versions as modern performers have covered the piece, but Vera Lynn is the obvious choice, since she popularized the song during the war, and it became one of her signature pieces. The video of this song most often seen is the one using the final moments of Dr. Strangelove, but those images of nuclear blasts were a little too dismal for tonight; I thought this one employing stills from WWII was at least a bit more upbeat.

The message of the song is for all TYWKIWDBI readers, especially the old-timers. It has been an interesting year; I've enjoyed having your company for this curious adventure. We'll meet again - tomorrow...

Addendum: The Guardian has a story about Vera Lynn at age 92, and about the upcoming publication of her autobiography.

It is 70 years to the month since Lynn, then 22, first recorded We'll Meet Again, which became a symbolic song of the second world war... Last night's No 1 made her the only artist to feature in the UK single and album charts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Update 2010: I needed some music to post on New Year's Eve, so this repost finds life once more. See you guys next year...

I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods this week, and ran across a description of someone's handwriting being like "copperplate script," so I decided to look it up.

Copperplate, or English round hand, is a style of calligraphic writing, using a sharp pointed nib
instead of the flat nib used in most calligraphic writing. Its name
comes from the fact that the copybooks from which students learned it
were printed from etched copper plates... the term "copperplate" is mostly used to refer to any old-fashioned, tidy handwriting...

All copperplate forms (minuscules, majuscules, numbers, and punctuation)
are written at a letter slant of 55 degrees from the horizontal.

A nice story at the BBC reminds readers that the Tasmanian ash trees are among the world's tallest trees.

The trees in question are mountain ash, the tallest flowering trees in the world. They are not quite the tallest trees of any kind: that record belongs to the coast redwoods of the western US. But that might be because things have been skewed against the mountain ash...

On the face of it, the mountain ash should be able to beat the redwoods,
which top out at 115m. They grow five times faster than the redwoods,
"sprinting" toward the skies. "They're the fastest-growing tree by far,"
says Sillett...

Historical records do indicate that mountain ash have reached greater
heights than today's giants in the past. In 1881, surveyor George
Cornthwaite measured a felled tree in Victoria at 114.3 metres. That is
about 1m shorter than the world's tallest living tree, a coast redwood
measuring 115.5m.

This was new to me:

...the tallest trees can suffer from "xylem cavitation", in which gas
bubbles form in the cells carrying water up the trunk. These tiny gas
embolisms [sic] can prevent water from moving up the tiny conduit cells, much
like a pulmonary embolism can stop blood flow to the lungs in humans. To
avoid this, the tree regulates how much water is lost through its
leaves by closing down the tiny pores all over their surfaces. But these
pores are also the pathways for carbon dioxide to come in, so by
closing them the trees limit how much sugar they can make.

Samira Omar pushes back her headscarf to reveal burn scars that
swirl along her face and neck. Her hands are also dotted with
colourless patches where her skin was scorched. The 17-year-old says she was the victim of a horrific bullying
incident in August. She says four classmates she thought were her
friends, beat her and then doused her with boiling water...

She thought she’d be scarred for life. But then Omar heard about para-medical tattoo specialist Basma Hameed... Over time, Hameed will camouflage Omar’s burns by tattooing them with ink that blends with her natural skin tones...

Patients from around the world seek out Hameed’s skills. She started her
Toronto clinic in 2011 and recently opened a second location in
Chicago. In addition to scar victims, she also treats people with
vitiligo...

Survivors Ink is a project that addresses the issue of branding. The
purpose is to empower human trafficking victims by breaking the
psychological chains of enslavement through beautifying, removing, or
covering the brandings that are constant reminders of a violent past.

...Craig Watts, 48, a North Carolina farmer who says he raises about 720,000 chickens each year for Perdue... Watts opened his four chicken barns to show how a Perdue chicken lives.

Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost
their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of
almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore...

[A spokesman for Perdue] suggested that the operator was probably mismanaging the chicken house. That
doesn’t go over well with Watts, whose family has owned the farm since
the 1700s and says he has been raising chickens for Perdue since 1992,
meticulously following its requirements...

The claim about the chickens being raised “cage free” is misleading
because birds raised for meat are not in cages. It’s egg-laying chickens
that are caged, not the ones we eat. So “cage free” is meaningful for
eggs but not for chicken meat. Moreover, Perdue’s chickens are crammed
so tightly in barns that they might as well be in cages. Each bird on
the Watts farm gets just two-thirds of a square foot.

I'll grant it's difficult to think rationally when your skull is being pelted with baseball-sized hail, but I should think the best strategy in this situation would be to wade deeper into the water and then squat to get your head 6-8" below the surface.Photo credit Nikita Dudnik/AP via the Washington Post.

The Cyr wheel (also known as the roue Cyr, mono wheel, or simple wheel) is an acrobatic device popularized in the early 21st century.

There are records of people using a similar apparatus as sports equipment during the 19th[citation needed] and 20th centuries. The cyr wheel was further popularized as a circus skill by numerous acrobats and circus artists during the 1990s and later by Daniel Cyr in 2003, who presented the first cyr wheel circus act at the 2003 Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris...

Cyr wheels are typically made of aluminum tubing. Usually a 1.5” diameter tubing with 1/8” sidewall 6061 aluminum is used. Generally they are made in 3 or 5 individual pieces, and connect with inserts. The inserts can be made out of solid aluminum or steel (either tubing or solid). They are then painted, and covered with a plastic PVC covering to add friction, and protect the metal.
Smaller wheels spin faster, work better for smaller spaces, and make "no hand" tricks easier than larger wheels. Larger wheels are more graceful and there is more room for suspensions.

In the video a young man documents his first 30 days using the wheel. Via Neatorama.

Chopin died in an apartment in Place Vendome, in Paris, on 17 October
1849, at the age of 39. France's greatest authority on tuberculosis had
diagnosed him with the disease months earlier, and duly noted it as the
cause on the death certificate.

But things then became less clear. The same doctor, Jean
Cruveilhier, removed Chopin's heart and carried out an autopsy.
Precisely what he recorded is not known - the notes he made were lost.
However, reports suggest he referred to something other than TB, a "disease not previously encountered"...

Then in September, the debate appeared to be over. The forensic and
genetic scientists who had gathered months earlier at the Holy Cross
Church in Warsaw for that unprecedented examination revealed their
conclusions at a news conference. Chopin's heart was well preserved and bore "TB nodules" they reported.
It was also "much enlarged, suggesting respiratory problems, linked to a
lung disease"...

... the possibility remains that the heart reinterred in the pillar of the
church in October 1945, amid patriotic celebration in the ruins of a
devastated city, is not Chopin's.

"In the eyes of the law, pets are possessions and when US citizens die,
they have the right to decide where they go... Connie Lay, of Aurora, Indiana,
had a few possible plans laid out for her dog Bela at her death. One of
them being the German Shepard be put down and her ashes put with hers... According to volunteers, she is a smart, well trained, sweet dog who
deserves a home. But according to the attorney handling Lay's estate, that was not her owner's wishes...several people have offered to adopt Bela but Denmure says it's Lay's
dog and the executor of her will has the authority to carry out her
wishes." (update: a tip of the blogging hat to reader Solange, who found that Bela is going to be transported to a sanctuary in Utah.)

An impressive video at Neatorama shows a horsehair worm emerging from a mantis. If that interests you, take a look at my 2013 post showing a roundworm emerging from a spider and the two videos of parasites emerging from crickets - important because the parasites seem to have evolved [or been granted by a god...] the ability to control the behavior of their host so that their emergence occurs in water.

"1000 colours" is a puzzle in which each piece is an different color. Time-lapse video of one being assembled at the link (via BoingBoing).

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse explains how to deal with junk mail. I have one aunt who has been contributing to various conservative political groups and as a result now receives an average of 60 solicitations per day in her mail. She wants to keep supporting Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio, but is dismayed to sometimes find up to two hundred items in her mail in a day. She has way more notepads and return address labels than she can ever use.

Officials in Wisconsin are studying techniques that will extract drinkable water from cow manure. "The treatments can strain virtually all of the phosphorus and solids out
of a large portion of the material, producing clear water and a
concentrated fertilizer that could be sold." The goal of course is not to procure more water, but to reconfigure the manure into separate water and solids to minimize environmental contamination.Image of impressive Christmas wrap cropped for size from the original posted at imgur.

27 December 2014

This image is a closeup of the reverse side of a $10 bill from the series of 1950C (printed between 1961 and 1963). It looks like the flag is being flown upside-down. This has been vehemently denied by government officials and numismatists:

It takes a team of eight engravers hundreds of man hours to engrave a plate used for printing currency. There is no rogue engraver out there inverting American flags. Whether the flag on the back of 1950 does or doesn’t appear upside down is all in the eye of the beholder. The fact of the matter is that the flag looks the way it is supposed to look.

So spread the message and please do not call asking about an upside flag on 1950 or any other bills. It is not a recognized error and it never will be.

An international team aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel
Falkor set a new record for the deepest fish ever recorded at 8143m in
the Mariana Trench. The fish is a completely unknown variety of
snailfish with a translucent body, broad wing-like fins and an eel-like
tail.

An article at BoingBoing makes note of the vast quantities of water stored in the earth's mantle.

Deep inside the mantle, where the temperature and pressure are so high
you would think it impossible, viscous crystalline rocks potentially
trap the equivalent of the Pacific Ocean...

We know that ringwoodite can hold water, but it has been determined that
below 660 km, ringwoodite transitions into yet another form of olivine
called bridgmanite, which can't hold much water. However, seismic
mapping experiments have detected areas of melt, melted material held
within the crystalline solids that differ in their chemical composition,
and which are possibly indicative of water, at depths of 760 km. This
is 100 km deeper than water should be able to venture...

Whereas previous estimates have put the amount of water in the mantle at
1-3 times the amount of water on the surface, this study brings that
quantity down to a single ocean. Regardless of the reduction, this is
still substantial considering that all of the water could have
originated from geochemical processes alone.

Five years ago at Christmas I set up a "collective greeting card" for the readers of this blog. There were only about a dozen responses, but they were good ones. I'd like to repeat the effort; it's too late for Christmas, so we'll make this a New Year's greeting.

Here are the instructions:

In the comment section to this post, give me a link to a photo (or a bit of artwork or other image) that you
have in your blog, or in your Flickr photostream or in some other
online storage site. Don't email me the photo - just give the link and
I'll go there and copy the photo.

The
picture can be of you, or your family, or your computer, or your cat,
or whatever - it doesn't matter.

In the comment, with the link write a brief (25 words max) greeting,
directed to the other readers and visitors (not a comment on TYWKIWDBI).

Sign with the avatar name you use in commenting here, or in your blog, or your real
name if you wish. I reserve autocratic right to edit comments and trim
pictures if they are too big, to limit the number if there are too
many, and to vaporize anything that hints of spam or might be offensive to other readers.

Addendum: Already fifteen responses, with a couple portraits/selfies of readers, a dog photo, a cat photo, a horse, a greeting card, a scenic, one sports, a nature, a retro, and even one butterfly. Keep 'em coming!

A lot of people asking how to help. Here is a list of organisations based in Uganda helping the deaf. One of my favorites, and for which it's very easy to donate to, is called Sign Health Uganda. The organisation which set up the course for Patrick is called UNAD - their donate link is broken so you have to email them directly.

GULFPORT, Miss. — In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction
project here in Mississippi: a $349 million laboratory tower, designed
to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of
space.

Then, NASA did something odd.

As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was
officially “mothballed” — closed up and left empty — without ever being
used...

The reason for the shutdown: The new tower — called the A-3 test
stand — was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was
designed for had been canceled in 2010.

But, at first, cautious NASA bureaucrats didn’t want to stop the
construction on their own authority. And then Congress — at the urging
of a senator from Mississippi — swooped in and ordered the agency to
finish the tower, no matter what.

The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it
didn’t need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to
maintain it in disuse...

So the tower stand has taken its place on NASA’s long list of living
dead. Last year, the agency’s inspector general found six other test
stands that were either in “mothball” status, or about to be. Some
hadn’t been used since the 1990s. Together, those seven cost NASA more
than $100,000 a year to maintain.

"I believe one of our secrets to thriving with polio is that we, first and foremost, quietly dismissed all those who gawked at us with pity, volunteered to Biblically heal us, needlessly tried to fix us, or gazed at our bent feet rather than into our eyes. As we have matured, we have learned to reject the shame and stigma of disability. What a freedom! We found out that such negativity gets old and is not useful. Out of necessity, we have had to become introspective from time to time, which inescapably fostered our personal character development. We have learned to be assertive when needed, to surround ourselves with loved ones, to think positively, get educated, find good resources and enjoy life along the way.

Perhaps most importantly, we have learned to accept ourselves as we are. Many of us have evolved in our thinking to appreciate and lovingly embrace what used to be our primary nemesis - polio. In order to find peace and contentment, we have had to make friends with our disability. Not overcome it. Not hide it. And not fight it... Polio has made us who we are today.

Our physical differences don't matter much anymore because we are all beginning to look like everyone else our age anyway. We, however, know a bit more about aging gracefully, because we started sooner than all of our friends. We are aging with a disability. Many of our friends are aging into disability. If they'll let us, we can actually help them with their new adjustments."

-- a couple paragraphs from a much longer, refreshingly upbeat, essay by Sunny Roller, MA (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - the lead article in the most recent issue of Post-Polio Health.

Credit to Suze, who found this in a cryptic crossword and posted it in a Sooper Seekrit location. Anagrams are not difficult per se, but ones that are logically consistent are uncommon. This one is awesome.

Posted not for the information per se, but rather to illustrate that linguistic maps can now be generated from analysis of Twitter data.

To
generate the maps, Grieve first searched for occurrences of these words
in the dataset. Once he identified word uses and their locations,
he used hot-spot testing, a common technique in spatial analysis. It
uncovers geographic trends in data by clustering together nearby areas
with similar results.

Tweets
are first adjusted by the population of the counties from which they
were sent. Then, the frequency of tweets for a given county is compared
to nearby counties...

For the distribution of "dude" and for some caveats on the methodology, see the source article at Quartz.

The question I have (for any budding planetary scientists out there) is how is it possible to measure the diameter of a gas giant planet like Jupiter? I understand all the data in the table are expressed as "average diameter" because even the Earth is not round, but the Earth's diameter is measured on a solid. How can data be obtained on a gas giant, where the gases would (presumably) gradually thin out as one gets further from the center. It seems ridiculously presumptuous to express such data to a precision of 1 km.

That aside, the concept of all the planets fitting between us and our moon is still mind-boggling.

The Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe has been working for more
than a decade to remove some of the 1,400-plus munitions barrels from Lake Superior’s bottom. Using grants from the Department of Defense’s
clean-up fund, Red Cliff officials has pinpointed that most of those
drums dumped a few miles northeast of Duluth.

In August 2012, an expert recovery team pulled up 25 barrels. Three
of the barrels had melted munitions parts, but the other 22 each
contained up to 700 ejection cups used in cluster bombs -- about 15,000
small explosive devices...

The dump area is in the ceded territory of Lake Superior tribes, giving
them the right -- and, the tribes say, duty -- to protect that sacred
area.

Traditions place [the origin of Yankee Doodle] in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War...

The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became contemporary slang for foppishness.
The Macaronis were young English men who adopted feminine mannerisms
and highly extravagant attire, and were deemed effeminate. They were
members of the Macaroni Club in London at the height of the fashion for
dandyism, so called because they wore striped silks upon their return
from the Grand Tour - and a feather in their hats.

Above text from the Yankee Doodle entry at Wikipedia. Image and the following from the related macaroni page:

The term pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire:

There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.

The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who far from their present
connotation of effeminacy came as a more masculine reaction to the
excesses of the macaroni...

Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour had developed a taste for macaroni, a type of Italian food little known in England then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club. They would refer to anything that was fashionable, or à la mode, as 'very maccaroni.'

A stone artifact (apparently part of a crucible) containing traces of molten metal has been found in subarctic Canada.

Dr Sutherland and her colleagues from the Geological Survey of
Canada-Ottawa and Peter H. Thompson Geological Consulting Ltd have now
discovered that the interior of the vessel contains fragments of bronze
as well as small spherules of glass.

According to the team, small ceramic crucibles were employed in nonferrous metalworking throughout the Viking world. “We are aware of only one stone crucible, which was recovered from a Viking Age context in Rogaland, Norway.”

The extrapolated shape of the complete crucible could have allowed it to fit into the keel of a ship.

I'm pleased to note that the location is about midway on the voyage from their known settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows to the southern end of Hudson Bay, from whence the Vikings would have been able to head south into Minnesota...

Contractions for numbers follow the same rules as contractions for
words. As a apostrophe goes where the letters are dropped in a
contracted word (e.g. you are into you're) the same applies to numbers
(e.g. 1950s into '50s)... By putting an apostrophe between the
numbers and the "s" (e.g. 50's), you are making the "s" possessive.

I see this type of mistake ("music of the 60's") frequently while browsing the web - and sometimes in the comments here. I think I sometimes refer to groups of years as "the 90s" without an apostrophe at all - not sure if that's acceptable.

It’s worth recalling in that context the actual words of the UN Convention Against Torture,
which was signed by Ronald Reagan and torn to shreds by Dick Cheney. It
guts both lines of Tenet’s purported defense. First up, there can be no
attempt to craft techniques that are close to torture but designed to
slip through a legal loophole. The Treaty’s full title is, for example,
“Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment“. The definition of torture is this:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such
purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a
confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a
third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind,
when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or
with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person
acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering
arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Intimidation and coercion are also expressly forbidden, when
implemented and authorized by an officer of state. President Reagan
included the broad definition in his signing statement:

The United States participated actively and effectively
in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the
development during this century of international measures against
torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification
of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United
States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still
prevalent in the world today.

In other words, the entire point of the Convention is to prevent any
wriggle room around what torture is and to include inhumanity...

Just as important, the context is irrelevant. Tenet’s plea to understand the context he was working in has no place here:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state
of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other
public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

That democracy can be a vehicle for
tyranny was well understood by earlier generations of liberal thinkers.
From Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill
through to Isaiah Berlin, it was recognized that democracy does not
necessarily protect individual freedoms. The greatest danger for these
liberals was not that the historical movement toward democracy would be
reversed, but rather the potential ascendancy of an illiberal type of
democracy — a development they saw prefigured in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
theory of the general will. Legal and constitutional protections have
little force when majorities are indifferent or hostile to liberal
values. Because democratic regimes can claim a source of legitimacy that
other forms of government lack, liberty might be more threatened in the
future than in the past. Most human beings, most of the time, care
about other things more than they care about being free. Many will vote
readily for an illiberal government if it promises security against
violence or hardship, protects a way of life to which they are attached,
and denies freedom to people they hate.

Today these ideas belong in the category of forbidden thoughts. When
democracy proves to be oppressive, liberals insist it is because
democracy is not working properly — if there were genuine popular
participation, majorities would not oppress minorities. Arguing with
this view is pointless, since it rests on an article of faith: the
conviction that freedom is the natural human condition, which tyranny
suppresses. But the mere absence of tyranny may allow no more than
anarchy; freedom requires a functioning state, with a competent
bureaucracy and a legal system that is not excessively corrupt, together
with a political culture that allows these institutions to work
independently of lawmakers.

In the absence of these conditions, human rights — which are,
fundamentally, legal fictions that are created and enforced by
well-organized states — are meaningless. Such conditions do not exist in
most of the world today and will not exist in many countries for the
foreseeable future, if ever. Where they do exist, they are easily
compromised. Far from being the natural condition of humankind, freedom
is inherently fragile and will always be exceptional.

A compilation of over 200 snippets from this past year's YouTube videos. No single common theme, but a heavy preponderance of adrenaline-junkie material, about which I have mixed feelings. But there are several segments in here I plan to post as full videos, after I retrieve them from this list of the source material.

BTW, if you're going to watch this, it's the type of video that really benefits from clicking the fullscreen icon at the lower right.

15 December 2014

"The typical spices used in winter include nutmeg, cinnamon, clove and
anise. These spices contain two groups of chemicals, the allylbenzenes
and their isomers, the propenylbenzenes. It was suggested 40 years ago by Alexander Shulgin that these substances act as metabolic precursors of amphetamines...Humans may be exposed to amphetamines derived from these precursors in
forno, the formation during baking and cooking, for example in the
preparation of Lebkuchen, or Christmas gingerbread. It is possible that
this may be responsible, in part, for uplifting our mood in winter. "

A set of two articles in Der Spiegel details the outrageous profits made by the human scum who act as traffickers for persons seeking asylum in Europe. "Jafir had insisted that the total fee for the trip to Italy -- €7,000 ($8,735) per person -- be paid in advance.
Ahmad doesn't comment on the amount, which corresponds to at least two average annual salaries in prewar Syria... Ahmad and 126 other refugees boarded the vessel..."

The Motherboard at Vice explains that "erection vendors" in Peru are driving some amphibians toward extinction. "Frog Juice, or Jugo de Rana, as it's referred to in Spanish,
has been dubbed the Peruvian Viagra. It's a concoction that's believed
to have strong medicinal powers with purported benefits including
increased blood flow, lung function, and more poignantly, sexual
stimulation."

The top song played in U.K. funerals is the Pythons' Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. I posted the video six years ago; I suggest clicking that link and playing it while reading the rest of this linkdump. ("Always look on the bright side of death. Just before you draw your terminal breath.")

An article (with video) at The Telegraph documents the changes that occur when a man adds ten non-diet Cokes a day to his diet. In a month "the previously gym-toned Mr Prior put on two stone in
weight, and saw his blood pressure rise to an unhealthy 145/96. He also
reported strong cravings for more sugar, even though he was consuming 350g
of sugar daily from his Coke intake alone."

So, you think you understand Putin's role in the situation in Ukraine? What if someone said it was the West that was responsible for the escalation of hostilities? "Europe and America did not understand the impact of these events,
starting with the negotiations about Ukraine’s economic relations with
the European Union and culminating in the demonstrations in Kiev. All
these, and their impact, should have been the subject of a dialogue with
Russia." That's Henry Kissinger speaking. The op-ed piece at Salon suggests "this is a non-Western nation drawing a line of resistance against the advance of Anglo-American neoliberalism across the planet."

Terminal lucidity is the subject of an interesting article in Scientific American. The term refers to "The (re-)emergence of normal or unusually enhanced mental abilities
in dull, unconscious, or mentally ill patients shortly before death,
including considerable elevation of mood and spiritual affectation, or
the ability to speak in a previously unusual spiritualized and elated
manner." For example " A 92-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease... hadn’t recognized her family for years, but the day
before her death, she had a pleasantly bright conversation with them,
recalling everyone’s name." At one of the links in the article a reasonable postulate is that when the brain is dying, an inhibitory hemisphere or locus dies first, releasing normal function by memory cells that had previously been suppressed.

06 December 2014

BoingBoing offers a comprehensive report entitled Everything you need to know about marijuana edibles. "It’s important for individuals to develop an idea of how they personally
metabolize any oral cannabis preparation, starting with a very small
dose and remaining patient until it’s thoroughly metabolized over six
hours, before taking more... individuals only having experience with the low-potency cannabis of the
Seventies and Eighties can be unpleasantly overwhelmed when consuming
today’s cannabis."

Naval war games in the Pacific Ocean threaten the lives of countless marine creatures. "Through 2018, the Navy plans to use
260,000 explosives — some as heavy as 2,000 pounds — and emit
high-frequency sonar for a total of 500,000 hours — including 60,000
hours of the most powerful sonar.

The population of Germany is falling; it is down by 2 million. "Mr. Voigt has already supervised the demolition of 60 houses and 12
apartment blocs, strategically injecting grassy patches into once-dense
complexes... In its most recent census, Germany discovered it had lost 1.5 million
inhabitants. By 2060, experts say, the country could shrink by an
additional 19 percent, to about 66 million. Demographers say a similar future awaits other European countries, and
the issue grows more pressing every day as Europe’s seemingly endless
economic troubles accelerate the decline."

A dinosaur newly discovered in Argentina - Dreadnoughtus schrani - is the largest animal ever found (so far). It weighed 65 tons (a Boeing 737 weights 50 tons). The photo at left shows a toe bone.

Those readers who have been following developments in the Antikyhthera mechanism will want to read about an update on the subject. The date it was constructed to be used was 205 B.C. - earlier than previously thought.

Millennials are not interested in golf. "Last year alone, some 400,000 people gave up the sport in the U.S.,
according to the National Golf Foundation. At least 160 golf courses
closed down, which marked the eighth consecutive year of net closings
around the country. Golfers played the lowest number of rounds since
1995."

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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About Me

I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net